Abrasive scrubbing pads are commonly used for many cleaning and personal care practices. In general, scrubbing pads include a naturally occurring or manufactured abrasive material. Examples of typical abrasive materials commonly used in the past include pumice, loofah, steel wool, and a wide variety of plastic materials. A non-absorbent abrasive material is often combined with an absorbent sponge-like backing material in these products. For example, the abrasive material often forms a layer on a multi-layer product which also includes an absorbent layer of natural sponge, regenerated cellulose, or some other type of absorbent foamed product.
These scrubbing pads tend to be expensive, making them unsuitable for a disposable or single-use product. Due to the nature of the product use, however, the products can become fouled with dirt, grease, bacteria, and other contaminants after a single use. As a result, consumers must replace these expensive scrubbing pads quite often in order to feel secure in the knowledge that they are using an uncontaminated cleaning pad.
Disposable fabrics with beneficial scrubbing or abrasive attributes for cleaning surfaces are commonly made with techniques involving printing or depositing abrasives made of hot melts or abrasive emulsion resin latex onto the surface of a nonwoven or paper fabric. Application of abrasive additives to a nonwoven fabric normally involves additional manufacturing steps, including steps to apply, cure, harden or solidify the material applied to the surface (such as by heating or cooling). Additionally, deposition of coarser, high denier fibers of cut staple length or continuous filaments on the surface of layered nonwoven substrates is a known technology for producing abrasive surfaces. Such high denier fibers may be 20 to 200 denier or higher versus the 0.5 to 15 denier fiber typically used for short fiber airlaid processes commonly used to make low cost, high performance wipes and disposable absorbent fabrics that are primarily made of woodpulp.
Alternatively, known methods using laminations of nonwoven fabrics to apertured films, or various scrims can provide an abrasive feature. However, these methods involve additional fabric costs and manufacturing steps and the resulting disadvantages. These methods generally produce fabrics with undesirable mechanical strength, and non-uniformity in the machine and cross machine directions, which may require the use of more materials to achieve the necessary minimum mechanical strength and are limited in their ability to produce desirable low-density fabrics with maximum absorbency.
Therefore, there is a need for a simplified direct process capable of producing abrasive and decorative effects in situ, without additional processing steps and associated limitations, using cost efficient low denier fibrous material.